Often Irreverent, Mostly Rational Blog for Fans of the Toronto Blue Jays. One Day, We'll Be Perfect.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Tuesday Morning Link Dump

Because this morning, we don't think that we could offer up anything better than our blog colleague, we offer up bucket trucks full of links.

Enjoy.

Blair on the Blue Jays: Now that he's a high-falutin' general sports columnist, we don't always get the chance to hear Jeff Blair's thoughts, feelings and impressions of the Jays. But in this morning's edition of Canada's National Bird Cage Liner, Blair lays it down for the Jays: "Change must be complete. It can’t be half-assed. The Flashback Fridays stuff? A generation doesn’t care any more. Sorry, that’s just the way it is." (Also, he uses the word "mollify". "Half-assed" and "mollify" in the same article? That's Blair. Awesome.)

A true meeting of the minds: Rather than watch the game last night, we listened to the Drunk Jays Fans podcast encounter with Toronto Star Chief Baseball Bloviator Richard Griffin. Griff tried his best to be a good sport, but towards the end, you could hear his angry old man thoughts come through. Then the boys took turns criticizing each other for not being hard enough on Dick. And there are cymbals struck throughout the show. Good stuff.

More rosterbation: We always like it when other blogs name-check us, especially when they do it in the first paragraph of a post in a flattering way. So how could we not link to Drew/Lloyd's post at Ghostrunner on First as he reconsiders his Adrian Beltre-J.J. Hardy strategy for Jays salvation? In short, we can't not. So here's the link. (Also, we comment on the post, and it's the best thing we've written in weeks.)

Travis Snider's Dad and his D: Mop Up Duty's Kman took apart Travis Snider's defensive abilities way back when, and Snider's dad didn't care for it. Kman insists that after further evidence, he is right about the Rosy-Cheeked Hope's glovework. We think that people just forget what it's like to have league average fielders.

Let's discuss J.P.: MLB Trade Rumors opened up a discussion of J.P. Ricciardi, which opened up the digital floor to all sorts of JaysTalk callers, armchair GMs and people with a tenuous grasp of the rules of punctuation and capitalization. (Excuse us, but we're sticklers for language skills. If you can't write coherently, you probably can't think coherently. Grammar is the foundation of logic.)

Jurrjens is good, no doubt, but his 2.75 ERA isn't in line with his 3.70 FIP and his 78.2% LOB rate and .279 BAbip show he's been lucky this year. But mainly, why the hell would we give up our first true home-grown .900 OPS hitter since...Wells(?..!), for a #3 starter in the AL East. We already have a Ricky Romero.

By the way, Carlos Delgado for Jays 1B. Come on, obviously. He's gonna have an age 38 season like Frank Thomas had for Oakland. What better way to bring back the fans than a homecoming for the best hitter in team history? Get 'er done, Rogers Blue Jays Baseball Partnership!

Not trying to hate here, just a question. Did you, after sternly insisting on proper grammar:1) Forget “the” in the last sentence?2) Leave out “the” as a joke and it’s just too high concept for me and has gone over my head.3) Quote some statement that is well known, just not to me.Seriously, this is just a Question Mr. Stieb. Love the blog.

Griffin wasn't exactly great when he was trying to make it through what were JP's biggest mistakes. I think when he said that he doesn't read others before he writes is a poor way of going about things. He just wants to avoid plagiarism accusations instead.